


Free Agent Orange

by nigeltde



Category: Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-03
Updated: 2008-11-03
Packaged: 2017-10-02 02:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short history of Freddy Newendyke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Free Agent Orange

**Author's Note:**

> Cheers to Veronamay for the beta.

This is Freddy Newendyke's most amusing anecdote:

_He does security work after classes during college, like a campus cop, you know? Classes during the day, working at night, never any time for anything. _Especially_ fucking, which is particularly fucking galling because all week there've been reports of couples, or maybe just one couple, having sex all over campus at night. Some said it was a dare thing, but Freddy suspects it's just that kinky public shit. So anyway, one night he and this other kid Patty the Fatty--real name's Patrick but he's seriously the skinniest fucker you've ever seen, so--are the only ones around when the call comes in, report of a Lewd Public Disturbance down by the library._

_Now Patty the Fatty and him have been squashed into their little booth/office thing for the past two hours, watching Starsky and Hutch reruns, high as kites, and one of them, he can't even remember whose idea it was, gets the idea that it'd be hilarious to go all covert ops and shit. So they grab their huge flashlights and hut! hut! hut! each other out the door and down to the library. They follow the sounds of moans and figure out that the couple's in a dark little open-ended alleyway between two buildings. Patty starts giving Freddy these bizarre fucking handsignals, they make Freddy almost piss himself, but eventually he realises that Patty wants him to go around to the other side of the alley. Freddy goes but it takes him ages, he keeps bumping into shit and when he hears Patty yell go go go go GO! he shouts out too and runs forward, except he's trying to pull out his fucking flashlight and turn it on and he trips and falls into the corner of the building and breaks his goddamn nose._

_So anyway, he gets there late and it turns out the chick is Patty the Fatty's girlfriend fucking her history prof, so Patty cracked her skull with his nightstick and then hung himself in jail. And there's a funny fucking story that happened to Freddy Newendyke._

Once he told it and even though he fucked it up, forgot to say that it was when he was at college, there was a sizeable group collected around his table and some hot girls who laughed and then looked suitably shocked and sympathetic and for a while he really thought he was going to get laid that evening. It was a good feeling, while it lasted.

Listen, you gotta face it: Freddy Newendyke is a bit of a loser.

\----

After Freddy told the commode story he and White stayed at the bar, shot the shit for like three hours straight and even if he hadn't wanted to he couldn't have helped learning a bit about the guy. He went _way_ back with Cabot, that was for sure, but he wasn't old school in the same way Cabot was. He was a Brewers fan. He was self-conscious about his thinning hair. He liked expensive booze, had a thing for blondes. Was good with his hands, had thick, blunt, surprisingly deft fingers.

His laugh was just as surprising, easy and full-throated, mouth stretching wide to crinkle up his eyes. With Joe and Eddie gone Freddy could almost relax and at some point in the evening he realised that he'd stopped concentrating on memorising shit and started concentrating on getting the guy to laugh some more. He spent half an hour trying to teach him the Zippo trick he'd practised to death in high school, simple when you've got the hang of it but impossibly cool. White was a quarter to wasted and Freddy was at least two beers beyond what he'd tell Holdaway later and every time White warned, "Kid, you'd best quit that fucking giggling," and his thief's hands fumbled the lighter _again_, it was pretty much the funniest thing, _ever_.

So yeah, maybe Holdaway wouldn't have approved, but that was what he was _supposed_ to do, right? Become one with the character. Get in with the bad guys. Christ, you can't blame a guy for doing his fucking _job._

\----

Freddy has a family, a mother who was spouse-raped for five years before she packed a bag for Albuquerque and a father with fists the size of catcher's mitts. He learned to read before most of the others in his class. It set him apart early so he just kind of fell into being a loner, and some habits are hard to shake, you know? When his instincts of self-preservation finally kicked in he took up boxing, not that it helped. The only other kid from his school that went still ignored him, and it did sweet fuck all for his body until he hit fourteen, too late to start making friends.

Comics and TV were pretty good to him though, Marvel and _M*A*S*H_ and _Baretta_, who was pretty much the coolest motherfucker in the entire universe. He washed dishes at a smelly diner for two bucks an hour when he was twelve, burning for money to buy his own Fred the Cockatoo until he found out exactly how expensive they were. He settled for Fred the Parakeet, who was almost pure white anyway, and spent three careful weeks teaching it to hop onto his finger and shoulder. Fred was going to be the first parakeet in the world to lean how to say _supercool_, but then one day he came home from school and found birdshit all over the den and a busted empty cage in the backyard, and that was the end of that.

Mandy Stephenson was his girlfriend in sophomore year. She had a droopy eyelid and hefty C cups and she loved him but he had to break it off. She was waiting for marriage and he couldn't take her home, not with his dad around, and he just couldn't really think of anything to do with her. There were only so many movies you could see, bowling alleys you could be bored shitless in. It was okay, though. He didn't really like her that much.

In his junior year he fucked the girl that Thomas Spence had his eye on. Spence was a senior who wore black jeans and leather jackets and listened to Black Flag, and when he found out he beat the shit out of Freddy, but not before Freddy had gotten in a few good punches of his own, learned what an equal match might feel like. Most people had the swagger, Freddy realised after that, but not the ability to back it up. Freddy was the other way around, and it was best to have both, so from then on he borrowed Spence's swagger whenever he needed it--ie., whenever he wanted to score, so pretty often.

College, well. College was just college. Better than high school, worse than the Academy; mostly just a waste of money. When he realised that he preferred his job to his degree he ditched them both and decided to become a real cop. He never really made any friends in those years but he did realise he was good at _being_ friendly, excellent at saying what people wanted to hear and getting the fuck out. He was expert in sincere remoteness. He went for gold in the Acquaintance Olympics. Freddy is that guy in your class who you saw every day but six months later can't pick out of a line-up; the cop who looks like he knows you and exactly what you're about when he pulls you over, and you've got no fucking clue why.

Anyway, someone somewhere eventually noticed and told someone else and that someone told Holdaway to call him in. There were tons of guys in undercover, though, so who the fuck knows why they had to pull in Freddy. Maybe he just looked like a thief. Maybe they could smell it, the stench of, hey, I am empty enough inside to be able to pretend to be other people for money.

Maybe it was just fucking destiny.

\----

Orange has a family too but they are theoretical. Orange came from no-one and he was going nowhere. He was just entirely, pristinely, himself. If people didn't think about him he literally ceased to exist. It's kind of a nice idea, if you think about it, and Freddy got used to becoming Orange for a living pretty rapidly.

He never would have told Holdaway but sometimes, when he forgot himself, it was even _fun_ being Orange. Joe, White and Pink were crack-ups and Blue had endless fucked-up stories, the kind that made your mouth drop and your guts squirm in delicious horror. Once Joe had told them their jobs it was mostly just sitting around waiting for the day of the shipment. They'd conference at the funeral place, do their stakeout shifts and after hours, they'd go to the bar and drink, and it almost felt like what he would have had at the station if he wasn't so, well, _Freddy_. There was also this point after three beers when he stopped thinking about hiding the secret, which meant that there _was_ no secret, which meant that he was just Orange and didn't have to give a shit anymore. Plus, _Orange_ could make friends, Orange was _great_ at making friends, and after that first night he and White pretty much became buddies, started to seek each other out. Pink called them faggots a couple of times but Pink called everyone a faggot.

Sometimes he wondered, though. White looked at him a _lot_, the kind of steady gaze that you can't help feeling, that would make the hair on the back of anyone's neck rise, make _anyone_ hyper-aware of casual pats and slung arms. Or sometimes they'd all be sitting around and he'd suddenly realise he had an elbow braced on White's chair and White didn't even notice, like maybe personal space didn't even _matter_ anymore. What happened was that occasionally when White looked at him, it felt like there was no point in being Freddy at _all_; and if it wasn't so exhilarating, that would be one scary fucking prospect.

\----

Once in Vegas (don't even ask. What a mistake. Fucking sinkhole of a city) Freddy had looked down an alley and seen two men. The one on his knees also had a hand down his pants and he grunted with every quick bob of his head. The one pressed against the wall was looking down and muttering to himself, and Freddy, drunk and high, was both of them at once, heavy cock in his mouth, hips jacking forward, tense and shuddering. When the wall guy threw his head back, stared at Freddy without even seeing him, Freddy stuck his hands in his pockets and drew his coat around to cover himself. He spat on the sidewalk and walked back to the car.

When he was ten Freddy and The Other Quiet Kid make an unspoken decision to give each other's company a shot, make their outsider status work for them. Adam had glasses way too big for his face and looked pretty much like the bugs he kept in the jar under his desk. Freddy gave him a dead caterpillar at recess and after school they went over to Adam's. They rubbished DC together and then they practised their kissing technique for like an hour. Freddy thought it was time well-spent but Adam wasn't allowed to see him anymore after that.

He fucked a stripper that night in Vegas, one with plastic tits so huge they stretched her nipples into little smilies, but you must have figured it out by now: Freddy Newendyke is kind of a faggot.

\----

This one time, maybe a week after they first met, when it all looked like it might be coming together, they continued the night back at White's. He had bottle of Woodford Reserve stashed away.

"I've just got this feeling," said White, splashing considerably more than double into each of their glasses. He spoke slower when drunk, and his voice deepened. It sounded like the bourbon tasted. "I don't want you to get paranoid, Christ, that's the last fucking thing. Stay cool. I'm an old man, who the fuck knows."

"What?" Freddy asked. White was silent a long time, heavy thought in the creases of his forehead, flicking glances at Freddy that made his palms sweat, made his casual voice die in his lungs. "What, old man? Jackass, you can't leave me hanging like that."

"I've just got this feeling," White said again, and slouched back in his chair. Freddy stared at the mostly empty glass in his hand and thought, _Jesus Christ, how many now? Get your fucking head examined_. "Look, don't tell anyone. But Mr Blonde, I don't know what the fuck his deal is. I get bad vibes."

Freddy's hand shook in relief and he had to take a sip to cover the clink of ice. "Vibes? What kinda vibes? You mean like cop vibes? Nah, he's so spaced out he's practically comatose."

White shrugged. "Good cover," he said, and Freddy supposed he was right.

"Christ. Fucking cops. A fucking traffic cop once pulled my sister out of her car in the middle of the four-oh-five, beat the shit out of her for a fucking parking ticket."

"Jesus." White shook his head. "What a fucking society we live in."

"Amen." He clinked his glass on White's, paused a second. "Of course, my sister is an aggravating fucking bitch," he said, and he grinned into his glass, drained it, watched White startle into laughter as the warmth of the bourbon glowed in his throat, kindled in his stomach. He got up and pulled the bottle from White's hand, sloshed himself another double. It didn't really feel like what he wanted, though; neither did a cigarette, he discovered after tapping one from the packet, so he stared at it for a bit, until White stood up too. He was breathtakingly close.

"Hey," Freddy said, barely recognising his own voice. White just looked at him, _at_ him, like he'd been doing for the past week, like somehow he _knew_ Freddy and there was no lying going on here at all. Freddy was frozen, petrified, until suddenly White plucked away the cigarette with one hand and slipped the other under Freddy's jacket, pressed it to his chest, thumb on sternum, burning through the thin cotton, no smile crinkling his dark eyes now.

_Whoa_, thought Freddy, and gasped, felt his guts jump about a foot backwards. But he let White step even closer anyway, let him push the shoulder of Freddy's jacket halfway down his back so he pretty much had to wriggle out of it, had to move his arms and then he had to put them somewhere too so he ran them up White's back, kneaded the muscle, tugged at his undershirt. _Jesus, this is too much_, as White backed him up against the wall and kissed him, hard and pornographic, and Freddy's hand was working at his belt, White's belt, his belt, he couldn't make up his fucking mind because everywhere that White touched felt like fire, fuck, like something _alive_. _Too far, way too fucking far_, screaming through his head but then White dropped to his knees and nothing in hell could have given Freddy the strength to put a halt to _that_.

Freddy was a free agent, but you have to understand: sometimes he only really felt like he existed around one person, and that person was, against all odds, really, _really_ good at giving blowjobs.

\----

_It's easier being a crook_, Pink said once, right at the beginning. _The bad guys wear uniforms_, and it was all Freddy could do not to snigger. The very next day Joe told them, _black fuckin' pants, ties, jackets, white shirts, yes you gotta wear the fuckin' tie. Pretend you're goin' to your momma's funeral_, and suddenly Freddy had to go shopping for a tie and jacket; White too, so they went together, and it turned out that White knew every fucking thing there was to know about tailors and suits and seams and fabrics and tie knots and sweet Jesus, it would have been the most boring afternoon in the entire fucking universe if White hadn't kept shrugging himself in and out of broad-shouldered jackets, hadn't kept turning to Freddy and asking his opinion.

The whole thing showed that Joe and Holdaway agreed on one point, at least: that the clothes really do make the man. After he got the assignment and the requisite lecture Freddy went straight out and bought a leather jacket from a thrift shop, soft and black. He threw it on with a white wifebeater and a pair of blue jeans and tried out a Tommy Spence swagger. He felt naked with the leather on his bare arms; dangerous. Fucking Baretta. Fucking supercool.

Other things Holdaway said were, _don't ever feel like you're invincible because what you are is a goddamn snail on the expressway and if you don't keep checking what's coming you're gonna be flatter than a fucking eight-year-old girl_, and _one day there's gonna be some girlfriend or something and you're gonna want to fuck her like crazy and your cock's gonna be singing and dancing all over the place and what you must do is never, ever, ever_ and he clipped Freddy on the head each time, _EVER fuck her._

Freddy never wrote these pearls of wisdom down, for obvious reasons. I mean, Jesus, you think he's some kind of fucking moron?

\----

So it turned out that Freddy loved taking it up the ass, that it made him moan like a whore, frantic like a back-alley fuck. It also turned out that White loved giving it.

They were totally fucking meant for each other.

\----

Joe kept a pretty close eye on his guys, and when he couldn't, he liked them to keep a pretty close eye on each other. He and White usually took care of that for each other, even in the first week, so there hadn't been much time for going through the Wisconsin books, time when he was three thousand percent sure that no-one was watching where he went. Even then he made excuses. A couple times though he couldn't avoid it so he'd spend a few hours at the station, drinking shitty coffee, flipping pages, lingering, dreading, leaving half an hour before Holdaway was due in.

He started planning; he couldn't help it. He'd grab White before the getaway and tell everyone that they needed a decoy car. They'd get out of the state without even a single diamond weighing them down. Or he and White would sidle out a back entrance at the rendez-vous. Or he'd convince White to turn state's evidence and they'd get a WPP life somewhere. Or he'd pull out the chloroform in the morning, before they even left for the fucking job, and by the time White came to they'd be in fucking Vancouver or Honolulu or something. No-one would get hurt, except maybe he'd take a non-fatal bullet for White, prove his loyalty.

Ridiculous, right? Fucking deranged. But his mind turned it over anyway. Jesus fuck, there's what you think, and what you feel, and pity the fucker who has to choose between the two, even when he's pretending he doesn't need to. Even when he can already feel the regret gathering, thundering, getting ready to roll on into town.

\----

"Enough of this shit," said White, late one night, and pulled him up by his hair. "You've got my cock in your mouth, I'm not gonna call you by some fucking codename. Orange, White, Pink, shit. I feel like I'm on fucking Sesame Street."

"Ah, I really don't think names are a good idea," Freddy said, and wiped his mouth, glad of the dark. "Don't tell me yours. I'm not gonna tell you mine."

"If it's Joe you're worried about, don't. I can take care of Joe."

"Hey, come on. I'm the new guy. The last thing I want to do is get on his bad side, gimme a break."

"All right, all right, Christ, Mr Fucking Burnt Sienna. Listen, after--"

"I don't want to think about afterwards," Freddy said and rolled onto his back, stared hard at the ceiling, wished it was clear so he could see straight though to the sky, the endless stars. He couldn't raise his voice above a murmur. "Shut up, you're gonna fucking jinx it."

"Fuck you. You're coming to Mexico with me whether you like it or not. If you don't I'll end up killing myself out of sheer boredom."

"Mexico?" White's hand was under his head, still cupping his skull, massaging his scalp. One of Freddy's favourite things was when White put his hand on Freddy's head during a blowjob, like some kind of bizarre blessing, heavy and constant, controlled and controlling. Freddy fucking loved that.

"Yeah, Mexico."

"What happened to Hawaii?"

"You wanna go to Hawaii?" White sounded surprised and Freddy realised that he'd never actually voiced that thought aloud. There were too many thoughts to keep track of, that was the problem. It was exhausting.

"Who _doesn't_ wanna go to Hawaii?"

"Hawaii's still a state, moron," White said, but there was a smile in his voice. "We can't go to Hawaii after the job. We'll get picked up. It has to be Mexico. I've planned it."

"Maybe another time, then," Freddy said, and wanted to vomit.

"Yeah," said White, into the darkness. "Well, whatever. Go to sleep. We've got work tomorrow."

\----

And there's a funny fucking story that happened to Freddy Newendyke.

The end.

**Author's Note:**

> feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
> [Rebloggable tumblr link for those so inclined.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/131344407621/free-agent-orange-3623-words-by-nigeltde)


End file.
